Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  Melissa escorted me into the intensive-care unit. We walked through the security doors and down the bright hallways. Henry had a private room where blinds kept the sunlight at bay.

  Translucent tubes, held in place with tape, ran from Henry’s mouth and nose to the machines keeping him alive. There was a dense assembly of pipes, hoses, cables and drips. His hair had been shaved during surgery to allow for the drains pumping blood away from the brain.

  ‘Not even a scratch,’ said Melissa.

  Henry’s weight had fallen to 60 kilograms – a dramatic drop. But the rest of his physical statistics were considered unremarkable except for the record of a grazed hand and a chipped tooth. No illicit substances were located in his system.

  ‘I’ll let you have some privacy,’ said Melissa.

  I held Henry’s hand. The screens and machinery obliterated my big words. We were both missing from the moment: him physically, me emotionally.

  I whispered, ‘I’m sorry, mate.’

  In the waiting room, Melissa hugged me. ‘Make me one promise.’

  ‘Anything,’ I said.

  ‘Never forget Henry, Lech. Never forget him.’

  ‘Of course. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t!’

  The car trip home was the same as all the others. I listened to the tyres sigh across the bitumen.

  In Glenvale, dusk bathed the cul-de-sac. A game show hummed behind the lounge-room blinds. Dad didn’t come in – his estrangement from Mum had recommenced. I went straight to my room and fell asleep.

  I woke to a vibrating iPhone. Outside was a symphony of insects and jiggling cat bells spliced by the occasional swiiiiiiiiish of a car passing not far beyond the back fence.

  At 5:35 pm, an ultrasound failed to detect any blood flow to Henry’s brain. His organs were removed and used to save the lives of five strangers. The only organ that counted was the brain: 1.42 kilograms of nothing.

  At 9:43 pm, I posted my final Facebook status on the crash. RIP Henry!!! I wrote. I’m going to miss you so much mate.

  Rest in peace. It was grief expressed with the depth of a radio jingle. I was heading off allegations of indifference. It had nothing to do with Henry, or Hamish, or Will, and everything to do with me.

  Maybe the grief I sought was no longer possible to feel. Maybe social media had made loss obsolete.

  Still, I dreaded the pending tributes that would expose my friendship with Henry as fairweather. So I changed my profile picture to an image of us together. The main emotion I felt was regret that we hadn’t taken more photos.

  How else could I prove what I had lost?

  Will’s and Hamish’s funerals were on a blue-skied Friday, six days after the collision. Hamish’s service was in the morning at Downlands, where he’d been a boarder since Grade Eight. I went to all three funerals with Dom, whose arm was still in a sling.

  We idled along the school’s driveway. In the back seat, Dom’s blue eyes – still bloodshot – were focused on the scene outside. He didn’t stop fidgeting. ‘How many people do you think are coming?’ he asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘Maybe a thousand.’

  The attendees packed the main hall and spilled out into the courtyards. Students wore blue blazers and striped ties with pins for extracurricular activities.

  I’d only met Hamish half a dozen times. It felt more like decades that we’d known each other. Two months before his death, Hamish had posted the words Wondai pride on my Facebook wall, the only direct digital conversation that I could track down.

  There were nine eulogists, including two younger sisters who also went to Downlands. Hamish’s dad looked like an older, thicker version of his lanky son, sent from the future to rectify the absurdity of the situation.

  I was struck by a fever of survivor’s guilt and imposter’s syndrome. What right did I, the survivor, have to cry? There were hundreds of people whose sorrow was more warranted than mine. So I muzzled any public displays of pain, toughing it out, as my father would say, up the guts, like mourning was a game of rugby league.

  Vincent gave a eulogy. Hamish had savoured physical activity: cricket, rugby union, shooting and waterskiing. But he also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. The average rugby player wouldn’t confess to an obsession with fantasy, but Hamish didn’t see the smart and simple sides of himself in opposition. He united the factions of tough boarders and bright day kids. The crowd laughed at a life that quietly animated the dry school environment.

  Hugs failed to allay the insanity of witnessing a dead friend get carried away in a timber casket for cremation. It was all too civil. We stood together and adrift, waiting for something to give, subsumed into a communal mood of isolated astonishment.

  Most of the mourners travelled in a motorcade to Will’s funeral on the other side of town. Autumn leaves spun across Ruthven Street like hundreds of miniature tumbleweeds. Dom and I sat in the back seat of his parents’ car. The chauffeur drove with a noticeable slowness to protect Dom’s broken bones.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to people,’ he said.

  ‘Just tell them that you’re sorry for their loss,’ I said.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘It’s better than nothing.’

  St Patrick’s Cathedral was situated within a precinct of petrol stations and car dealerships. Fumes mixed in the musty air with incense and candle wax. The graffiti of sinful Christian kids was carved into wooden pews packed to capacity. Stragglers listened to amplified hymns from plastic seats on the front lawn, their suffering interrupted by the gear changes of trucks and buses.

  Dom and I selected a pew towards the front of the cathedral. The windows were stained yellow and blue. Sunlight became blinding if you looked through the glass.

  The funeral was more sombre than Hamish’s. The average age of the audience and eulogists was older. We got the blunt message that Will wasn’t coming back.

  A logbook, an airport card and earmuffs were placed on the coffin. A flyover of the gravesite would be performed later. His sister recited a passage that Will had written about flying. I was stunned by the depth of someone who’d seemed so down-to-earth.

  Some people might say that freedom is being alone in the bush with the only sounds being murmurs from the birds, he had written, but I believe freedom is at five thousand feet with no other sound but the engine roaring.

  In his father’s oversized blazer, Dom wept with a directness that I later came to envy. ‘It’s okay, mate,’ I murmured.

  Outside, the sky had faded into a greyer shade of blue. News crews recorded the procession of the casket to the hearse. Young men exhaled through quivering noses, mouths closed, afraid of the sounds that might emerge if they opened them. I squirmed in the expiring sunlight.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I said again and again, the survivor who couldn’t cry.

  I bluffed a thousand apologies that day, though privately I was unsure what I was sorry for. I was sorry for being so sorry. I was sorry for not being more sorry.

  There was no vocabulary for the strangeness of bereavement, especially when the departed were young, the end so abrupt. We couldn’t use soothing euphemisms about a good innings or going to a better place.

  Hamish and Will would never get to make the mistakes that shape a character, the way people break hearts and drift apart from family members. Most of us would never trade the rifts and disappointments of adulthood for that terrible perfection.

  The third funeral was on the front lawns of Downlands. It was seven days since the first two services, nine days since Henry was pronounced dead, thirteen days since the crash. I picked up Dom from his house in Mount Lofty, a quick trip from the site of the accident. We found a parking space at the school where I used to spare Henry from catching the bus back to Highfields.

  The morning brimmed with peculiar intensities of déjà vu and newness. Blue skies. Bouquets on a brown coffin. One thousand mourners gathered to be touched by the r
ituals of public suffering. We had done this all before. We had never done anything like it.

  I sat with Dom and Vincent near the front. Someone clutched my shoulder. I hadn’t known my father was coming. We shook hands firmly. He had taught me to make eye contact and err on the side of hurting a man’s palm and fingers when shaking them.

  ‘Keep your chin up, mate,’ he whispered.

  My father didn’t need to deliver the message. I was afraid of publicly or privately displaying favouritism, of appearing to be affected by one death more than another. So I distanced myself from physical particularities.

  It’s not like I’ve known him forever. Will and Hamish died too. It could’ve been worse – Nick and Tim are still alive. I could’ve been killed.

  I diminished Henry in self-defence. Teenage boys are petrified of confessing how much we mean to each other.

  Henry’s photo beamed from the cover of the memorial booklet, the same image that they would use in the newspaper the next day. An oval face with a snub nose and chiselled jawline. Dimples flanking big teeth, and the trademark split dividing his bottom lip. Tan skin and a long, curling fringe that was blond at the tips – souvenirs from those summer road trips to the coast.

  The priest began the Eucharist. I studied the program as though I were cramming for an exam, so that my gaze couldn’t stray and make contact with anyone. The coffin was sprinkled with holy water. On top were placed a guitar, car keys, a First XV jersey and boots, and a pillowcase. We listened to psalms, hymns, prayers, and blessings. Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ hissed from the speakers.

  ‘Lord, we pray for all the families affected by this tragedy,’ said one reader. ‘May your healing presence strengthen and support them in this time of need.’

  On the Sunday morning before Henry’s funeral, Melissa had called to ask if I would deliver a eulogy. I was on the way to see Nick at the Gold Coast Hospital, after visiting Tim in Brisbane the day before. I should’ve politely declined. Henry had closer mates who weren’t gripped by the challenge of being a stoic survivor.

  My eulogy featured punchline after punchline. ‘Where do you start with Henry?’ I said. ‘He was the singer of songs, the stealer of shirts, the guy with a thousand clichés, who always got the best-looking girl and never paid for a feed in his life.’

  I worried that my stories weren’t funny enough, that there wasn’t the perfect anecdote to distil the macho Casanova I believed people wanted to remember.

  ‘Henry had many achievements in his eventful life,’ I said, ‘but there was one that outstripped all others: mounting the giant horse above the saddlery on Taylor Street late one Friday night after a few too many beers. You should’ve seen the size of the bloody thing!’

  I presented Henry the way most teenage boys want to see themselves: funny, popular, brave, uncomplicated. It got a tremendous reception. Henry’s friends were in stitches. I missed the cringing ripple among the witnesses who knew his deeper side.

  Melissa was dismayed by the abbreviations. ‘Henry was so much more than that, wasn’t he?’ she asked, not bitterly, but sifting for a skerrick of reality.

  What if I had told the audience that Henry’s talent wasn’t sleeping around, but having platonic friendships with women? That he didn’t resist the friend zone like it was the Bermuda Triangle? That he was a son who wasn’t afraid to say ‘I love you’ to his mother, alone or in front of others?

  Henry wasn’t an academic mastermind or a champion athlete, but he was a genius at generating intimacy within a diverse social network, and making the people he met feel better about themselves.

  I should’ve spoken about the marvel of meeting someone who enlarged rather than restricted my sense of self. But I down-played the accumulation of company that can’t be spun into funny stories, and the comfortable silences that define a friendship just as much as the parties.

  The sun crept into the west and shone behind us. Mourners fanned themselves with memorial booklets, necks red and armpits wet. The keepsakes were removed from the coffin and more holy water sprinkled. The choir sang in Latin as the pallbearers made their delivery. A guy wearing a kilt played the bagpipes and led an idling hearse past a dehydrated guard of honour.

  As Henry’s body was driven to the crematorium, we retreated to the dining room for refreshments. Waiters lingered with plates of finger food. Grievers breathlessly estimated attendance figures.

  ‘Henry was a popular boy,’ said one mother. ‘There must’ve been a thousand people here today. At least.’

  Onlookers mistook my dissociation for maturity.

  ‘You’re a tough bugger,’ said the father of a friend. ‘That was a great speech you gave today.’

  ‘He was a great mate,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna miss him.’

  Spoons and teacups clattered against china. Ringtones sang from pockets amid the polite chatter and muted amusement. The school bell blew regular reminders that life continued beyond the wake.

  ‘You know,’ said one woman, ‘He does everything for a reason.’

  I munched on a sandwich. ‘Who’s that, sorry?’

  ‘God. He must have big plans for you.’

  Strangers expected me to do something immense, to leave a mark on the world big enough for three people.

  ‘You are a lucky boy. Don’t waste this, will you? No, I’m sure you’ll do incredible things. But above all, be happy.’

  We expect survivors to grin and bear the events that tear them apart. I encouraged these far-fetched ambitions. ‘I’m not going to let this gift go to waste,’ I said. ‘Henry wouldn’t want me to be miserable for the rest of my life.’

  A few people bravely interrupted the bullshit.

  ‘How are you really holding up?’ a man asked. ‘A lot of people are going to piss in your pocket. But grief isn’t a kissing contest.’

  ‘It’s a terrible tragedy,’ I said, ‘but I’m just hanging in there.’

  Hanging in there. Hanging in there. Hanging in there.

  Behind my saccharine clichés was utter nothingness. I was neither holding up nor falling down, just aimlessly continuing.

  Later, alone, I wondered: Where am I hanging? What am I holding onto?

  There were no days since the accident, not in the traditional way of 24-hour phases following one after the other. I had kissed goodbye to the rhyme of being alive when the possibility of happiness wasn’t sabotaged by a rational sadness.

  A Portrait of the Artist as a young Larrikin

  An artist doesn’t happen by accident, and neither does a larrikin. My parents met at a backyard barbeque in Ipswich, circa 1979.

  Mum was a nervous bookworm and a financial clerk for a department store – a bush poetry enthusiast with a permed mullet who shunned make-up, dresses and jewellery. She was allergic to public speaking and physical exercise.

  She said, ‘Slow and steady finishes the race.’

  She said, ‘You’re not playing for sheep stations.’

  She said, ‘You don’t need to win anything to have fun.’

  Dad was a 130-kilogram cab driver with a mullet and a handlebar moustache who had never read a novel in his life. A rugby league coach and a former professional gambler, he let off steam at weekends by punting large sums on thoroughbreds and greyhounds. He peppered his enemies with sledges and sculled beer from a saucepan. Beating people was the meaning of life.

  He said, ‘If you’re not first, you’re finished.’

  He said, ‘You need to risk it to get the biscuit.’

  He said, ‘Never trust a bloke who doesn’t drink.’

  I have her to thank for the vocabulary and him for the ego.

  Both dropped out of high school before Grade Nine to support their families. Dad dreamed of being a rich businessman. Mum dreamed of raising a big family.

  After tying the knot, Mum suffered six miscarriages. The pragmatic battlers became foster carers instead and relocated to the bush in pursuit of a cut-price Australian dream. By autumn 1991, they’d leased three run
down pubs across country Queensland and accepted six permanent foster children under the age of twelve. This brood sometimes blew out to ten or eleven.

  ‘One more try,’ said Mum, who had started taking a shady oestrogen-replacement drug from a rogue fertility doctor at the age of thirty-eight. It was manufactured from the urine of pregnant mares.

  Secretly, she daydreamed about a baby girl named Amy Blaine, another shy female, and a rare example of her personal preference prevailing over that of her cocksure husband.

  ‘Let’s hope the piss came from Phar Lap’s granddaughter,’ said Dad, craving a biological son who could run the hundred metres in under ten seconds.

  On 22 January 1992, I arrived to great fanfare, surprisingly alive, a miracle child with a full-blown god complex. My mother emerged from a C-section to see her first breathing baby wrapped in a pink sheet. The hospital had run out of the blue ones it used for boys.

  ‘It’s a girl!’ she cried.

  ‘Nope,’ said Dad. ‘It’s a boy.’

  According to my eldest brother, Trent, it went back and forth like this: It’s a girl! It’s a boy! It’s a girl! It’s a boy!

  Mum gestured desperately. ‘Why would they give a pink sheet to a boy?’

  Dad unwrapped the sheet to expose the only evidence that mattered, his prize for a lifetime’s supply of bad luck. ‘My kid’s got a dick!’ he roared.

  My father won naming rights and named me after his doppelgänger, Lech Wałęsa, a fat battler with a thick moustache. Lech was a revolutionary trade unionist and the freshly elected president of Poland. My pop John had been a blacksmith on the Ipswich railway and vice-president of the Queensland Ironworkers Union – this was why a bartender in Wondai dedicated his long-awaited heir to Eastern Europe’s great emancipator.

  At the age of sixteen, my father had shattered his hip at the Ipswich meatworks and spent six months in hospital. He never played rugby league again. That bitter winter, Dad’s brother George won the Bulimba Cup for Ipswich as a goalkicking fullback, and his sister Rita gave birth to a blonde bombshell named Allan Langer.